Fluorescent Black

Big Dada;
2009

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Even with the 10th anniversary of their debut album around the corner, it seems silly to ponder Anti-Pop Consortium's place in hip hop. Name, sound, rhyme style, lyrical content, release sleeve iconography: Anti-Pop were stylized (by the press as much as by themselves) as a fuck-you, a caustic riposte to a genre that had apparently taken every wrong turn possible in the 1990s. They likely give as much of a shit about how they "fit in" with rap in 2009 as they do about concepts like "limited appeal."

Which is not to say the group doesn't have enough history behind them to be assessed on their own terms. They've gone from straight-up alienating to a somewhat reconciliatory place within the hip-hop nation. For an act usually classed with the late-90s mini-boom in indie-rap futurism, Anti-Pop's earliest 12"s sounded as if they were made with equipment as old as the printing press. A move to Warp for 2002's Arrythmia added a fresh coat of accessibility to Anti-Pop's antagonistic minimalism.

Fluorescent Black-- their first non-collaborative album in seven years-- sounds like Anti-Pop spent their time away coming to grips with the implied-but-never-fully-embraced pleasure principle of Arrythmia via side projects and solo albums. The foursome's name only occasionally suits the music here, unless you take branding into consideration. Fluorescent Black won't blow up at a time when Rick Ross deigning to sound interested on his own album is considered a major step forward among hip-hop critics, but here Anti-Pop take a less partisan approach to fun.

And so since we're talking party music: "NY to Tokyo"-- which sounds stitched from 21st-century De La Soul and Men At Work's melody library-- is chipper, about the last adjective I ever expected to use to describe an Anti-Pop record. And while Beans remains the Anti-Pop member you could best sell to rap fans who consider it music rather than some outlaw adjunct to poetry, even M. Sayyid and High Priest sound loosened up across the album, slowing down, using crowd-pleasing pacing, more willing to meet an audience raised on "Crank Dat"-grade rhymes halfway.

"Goofy": there's another word you'd be more likely to slap on Soulja Boy than Anti-Pop. Ditto "playful." And yet here's "Born Electric", with a hammy piano intro and ludicrously straight-faced crooning, managing to evoke Journey, Derrick May, and Vanessa Carlton within its first minute. I'm not even sure if Mike Ladd at his most Infections/Majesticons promiscuous would put Detroit pads and AOR cheese-pomp in the same track, let alone as its appetizer. Fluorescent Black's backing tracks, in all their mutant techno overbrightness and zig-zagging detail, re-expand the indie hip-hop palette. Not always to the good, mind you. Is "The Solution" a Kanye/T-Pain robo-voice tribute or parody? Or just a lukewarm trend jack? So sometimes they may be winking too hard to sell certain songs as anything other than well-made gags-- Anti-Pop's button-pushing still makes a nice break from all the posthumous J Dilla fellatio going around.

All this lightening up is probably good for the soul, but what of the Anti-Pop refuseniks first fell in love with? Sometimes it crops up in unexpected ways. I appreciate anyone with the balls to scatter fans and foes alike with an album-opening blast of fugly hair metal. But my favorite track here might be the shortest and most "traditionally Anti-Pop." Lasting 1:30, its foul synth lurch like real-deal Rotterdam rottenness, Beans rips through "Dragunov" without pause, hook for cover, or cop to, well, pop. Music stripped to blunt-rhythm-and-nothing-but, the rap an excuse to leave fans breathless over skills they don't possess, "Dragunov" is hip-hop as old west line-in-sand at high noon, half-steppers left outside to wonder what the fuss is about.

These go-hard-or-go-home tracks are still sprinkled across Fluorescent Black-- dizzying first single "Capricorn One"; "End Game", a near-arrhythmic duel between gunshot-terse rhyme fragments and the beatbox it sounds like they're slowly killing; "Timpani"'s (yes, them again) Neubauten tribalism and pervy Martin Denny jungle howls. But those who've been along for the 10-plus year ride may be looking for more of them. No one could stay as intractable as early Anti-Pop forever-- who would want to, except maybe straight-up horse-corpse-beating nihilists?-- but this sort of delight in scrapping is still what APC do best. The idea of an Anti-Pop greatest hits may be anathema-- at least philosophically-- but the moments when they push the genre's boundaries, rather than just fan expectations, are the parts of the group's catalog that will endure.